Jaclyn’s Review: The Explosive Child by Ross W. Greene, PhD

The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
written by Ross W. Greene, PhD
published by Harper Paperbacks, 2014

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Books, Target, Walmart, Kobo, Book Depository, Goodreads

Did I enjoy this book? I wanted to like this book more than I did. I thought this would offer some additional insights on how to work with my strong-willed children. Instead, this book offered some terrifying case studies of children who were much more extreme in behavior than my children. Additionally, the majority of the book focused on teaching parents how to pick your battles with your inflexible children. Maybe some parents do need to work through this, but I felt like it was just repeating things I already knew.

Would I recommend it? I think there is a very narrow audience for this type of book. As with any parenting book, I would recommend that you read it but only apply what works for you and your family. This is definitely not for everyone.

 

 

About the book – from Amazon:A groundbreaking approach to understanding and parenting children who frequently exhibit severe fits of temper and other intractable behaviors, from a distinguished clinician and pioneer in this field.

What’s an explosive child? A child who responds to routine problems with extreme frustration—crying, screaming, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, spitting, destroying property, and worse. A child whose frequent, severe outbursts leave his or her parents feeling frustrated, scared, worried, and desperate for help. Most of these parents have tried everything-reasoning, explaining, punishing, sticker charts, therapy, medication—but to no avail. They can’t figure out why their child acts the way he or she does; they wonder why the strategies that work for other kids don’t work for theirs; and they don’t know what to do instead.

Dr. Ross Greene, a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the treatment of kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges, has worked with thousands of explosive children, and he has good news: these kids aren’t attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated, and their parents aren’t passive, permissive pushovers. Rather, explosive kids are lacking some crucial skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving, and they require a different approach to parenting.

Throughout this compassionate, insightful, and practical book, Dr. Greene provides a new conceptual framework for understanding their difficulties, based on research in the neurosciences. He explains why traditional parenting and treatment often don’t work with these children, and he describes what to do instead. Instead of relying on rewarding and punishing, Dr. Greene’s Collaborative Problem Solving model promotes working with explosive children to solve the problems that precipitate explosive episodes, and teaching these kids the skills they lack.

 

 
 

* This post contains affiliate links.

** This post first appeared on Every Free Chance Books (everyfreechance.com) on October 16, 2019.